Look who's stalking
Montreal, 2002.
Day One
Arrive in Canada, keeping it (Mont)real. My hotel is in a wonderful location, especially if you’re into hoochie mamas and covert drug deals. You half expect the concierge to hit you for spare change every time you cross the lobby. My first night is quiet – just five or six beers as a purely soporific measure – as I watch some fairly mediocre comedians all talk about getting stopped at customs in airports. I sleep safe in the knowledge that I will succeed in fulfilling the aims of my trip - to get back to my roots, Montreal being the birthplace of my maternal grandfather, and to catch up with the British acts at the Comedy Festival. Well, those things and to hunt down and stalk the actress, comedienne and all-round legend Janeane Garofalo.
Day Two
I check in at the press desk to get my accreditation for the festival. I could tell that getting access to the big names was going to be less than a breeze by the way they kept asking “Sorry, who are you again?” over and over. It quickly dawned on me that I was barely more than a chimp in the media circus, and not even one of the better ones – more like a mangy, malodorous old chimp that’s forgotten all its tricks and has fleas and dropsy. I put in my interview requests to barely-restrained sniggering, though they just say that they’re “unable to confirm” whether I could interview JG or not, though later that evening I’m being ridiculed on stage having won two lamb chops in a meat raffle, which is the next best thing, natch.
Day Three
Major progress as visual and verbal contact with JG is made. It doesn’t go altogether swimmingly as in the first 30 minutes, she mentions her boyfriend, that she has irritable bowel syndrome, has stopped drinking, and the fact that she lives with her boyfriend. Oh, plus there are 300 other people in the room and she’s on a stage. There was THAT, too. All in all, not much chance to get in any lines (eg. “Is it hot in here or is it just you?”) without coming across as a slightly disturbing heckler. I’d already got into trouble with one of my fellow audience members, a deranged American whose seat I accidentally stole. He’s kind of old and bristly and during the course of the night, he actually tells someone that he “killed five people in Vietnam”, though it remains unclear as to whether this was in the war or not.
Day Four
I’m kind of despondent as I figure JG will have blown town after her (very funny) show. I hang around the press desk and am offered an interview with a Canadian comic I’d never heard of. I realise I don’t have any power as a media player. I feel…what’s the word…im-mediated? Then someone obviously in the know (I could tell he was more important as he had a more ironic t-shirt) comes to the desk and asks where the JG press conference is. In a fit of journalistic near-genius, I listen to the directions too. I’ll show them, what with their “broadcast media only” and “going through the proper channels”.
Ironic T-shirt gets chatting, and I sidle off, find the room and prepare to sneak in, only to be thwarted by a locked door and the fact that nothing was happening and my brilliance had not reached the dizzy heights of finding out what time the conference was. 30 minutes later a coupe of clipboard-wielding flunkies went in. I went back to my book. 10 minutes later, I look up again. And. There. She. Is. There’s just me and JG in an empty corridor. She’s three feet away. We register each other for a split second and…reader, I bottled it. Whatever you say to start conversations with famous strangers just got stuck in my throat, and she wandered into the conference room.
TV crews arrive, radio crews…I approach a clipboard flunky and ask if there was any chance that Miss G could fit in a few minutes for an interview. She looks around at the gleaming cameras and mics and technology and ironic t-shirts, and then at me with my scrappy notebook and pen and no hint of sartorial irony and says sorry, but there wouldn’t be time. Truth is, there might have been time, but it had already slipped through my fingers. Obviously the only thing to do is to get hammered, which I predictably manage, and by the time I see her perform at the Bill Hicks tribute, it’s all forgotten. The close shave, which street my hotel’s on, what my name is, all of it.
Day Five
The very particular hell of the Howie Mandel Gala Night (eight comedians talk about getting stopped at airports, plus there’s a juggler and a really loud lesbian) is something I won’t try and conjure up. Suffice to say by the end of it, I can’t help but talk to people (I’ve tagged onto an American press group) in the style of a bad comedian – “Hey, are we getting taxis? What’s the deal with taxis, huh?!” The remedy came at a small alternative club later on, when, oh look who’s stalking ME now, JG plays a set in front of about 50 of us, including some big fat guy with a goatee blocking my view, who, after me barracking him for being in the way, turns out to be Matt Groening. Afterwards, I met up with one of the press girls who reassures me that you practically had to be a national TV station to get an interview with JG and that they only got 5 minutes each anyway. Well, I would have taken five seconds. How long can it really take to get a DNA swab, after all?